Paul Tillich Quotes
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Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned.
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At the end of ancient civilization ontic anxiety is predominant, at the end of the Middle Ages moral anxiety, and at the end of the modern period spiritual anxiety.
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The second element in absolute faith is the dependence of the experience of nonbeing on the experience on being and the dependence of the experience of meaninglessness on the experience of meaning. even in the state of despair one has enough being to make despair possible.
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The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements (as well as one's deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.
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There is no love which does not become help.
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Language... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.
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Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith.
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We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love.
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Cruelty towards others is always also cruelty towards ourselves.
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Neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being.
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The first duty of love is to listen.
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The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.
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Philosophy and theology ask the question of being. But they ask it from different perspectives. Philosophy deals with the structure of being in itself; theology deals with the meaning of being for us. From this difference convergent and divergent trends emerge in the relation of theology and philosophy.
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The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.
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In Calvinism and sectarianism man became more and more transformed into an abstract moral subject, as in Descartes he was considered an epistemological subject.
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Life remains ambiguous as long as there is life. The question implied in the ambiguities of life derives to a new question, namely, that of the direction in which life moves. This is the question of history. Systematically speaking, history, characterized as it as by its direction
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I hope for the day when everyone can speak again of God without embarrassment.
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God's forgiveness is unconditional. There is no condition whatsoever in man which would make him worthy of forgiveness. If forgiveness were conditional, conditioned by man, no one could be accepted and no one could accept himself. We know that this is our situation, but we loathe to face it.
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If my tongue were trained to measures, I would sing a stirring song.
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Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.